Porch Fight
by HappierThanMost
Summary: Roles in the family are unclear and it's causing tension between Darry and Soda.


**PORCH FIGHT**

"And you better put that damn cigarette out when I'm talkin' to you." Darry's on his high horse again, walking over to me on our junky porch like he's the boss of this domain, and I lean away like a pissed off cat when he reaches for my smoke. My sharp reflexes may take him by surprise but no more than my shitty attitude lately.

"Damn Darry, ever heard you can look but you can't touch?" I wise off, but I go ahead and put it out like he asks, flicking the butt out into the yard and I'm nice enough to blow my smoke out of a crooked mouth, not directly in his furious face.

"What the hell's gotten into you Sodapop?" he asks and he's right in front of me so I have to look up. He's always good at physically reminding me who's larger, who's taller, who's above me in all kinds of ways. His question, not really meant for an answer is seething but whispered, since he's trying his best not to wake up the one inside he's trying to raise. The one who's really controlling our entire life. The one and only meaning of mine and Darry's existence anymore.

I let him chew me out but don't listen, keeping my eye fixed on the brown beetle that's crawling it's way up the gallows to the bug zapper, lured by its fluorescent glow. And while Darry's playing out this dad role he's got going, to me a bunch of white noise, I think about the freedom I get to feel in a world that only exists in the seedier hours. The loud music, the easy way the drinks flow, the easy way the girls always give it up to me, the chance I finally have to be away from all this. Drama. Tragedy really. Sometimes I want to forget. Is that so wrong? I'm almost seventeen and drowning in a midlife crisis.

"Just cause you ain't in school no more don't mean this ain't a school night for all of us. Your punk ass can't just run off with Dal at all hours and then come struttin up this walk at three in the mornin' cause you think you're some hot shot full-time gas station man now."

My eyes dart to his briefly. His tone is firing me up and he better cool it if he doesn't want a wrestling match breaking out on this worn out porch right now. My hands are tight fists in my pocket but I bite back and find my bug again, just in time to watch it fry, a sharp and quick electrocuting buzz to sound out its dumb demise.

"I've already told you once," he keeps yapping them jaws and poking my chest with his middle finger, "to pull your shit together. I can't keep dealin' with you when I got Ponyboy to tend to." Suddenly he takes a breath, drags his face hard with his hands as he collapses into the porch swing, and I see how tired he really is and I'm guessing this is him waving his white flag. The chains of the swing rattle as if distressed, struggling to hold up all of Darry's weight and heavy burdens. I breathe out my anger and my fingers relax and I rub the sweaty palms against my jeans.

I turn and back against the railing, boost myself up to sit, make sure to secure my feet behind the wooden slats to keep me from swaying or falling. I'm not drunk but the world seems a little less solid tonight, my foundation a little off balance. The wind feels good through the shirt on my back.

Darry and I say nothing for awhile. We're letting each other calm down. Or maybe it's just because the silence is soothing for both of us. All we do anymore is talk and yell and give orders and guide Pony and come together to wrack our brains on how to come up with the money each week or whisper all night behind closed doors about how we're gonna handle this or that, stocking the arsenal for each crisis that rises against us. Right now please yes, just give me quiet. A dozen more bugs are met by annihilation while we sit in the stolen moment and rearrange our thoughts.

Darry, in a voice softer than I've heard it in awhile, reaches out across the dark and he's sounding a little like Pony. "I ain't tryin' to be some kind of version of Dad to you Soda. I don't want to be that. Hell, I don't wanna be your guardian."

I nod my head. I know he doesn't want to, but it's exactly what he's been doing lately. And that's what's rubbing me the wrong way. He can't expect me to be in the war room with him every night, bellied up to the big boy table charting attacks, helping him run this monster of a machine and battling alongside him, then treat me like some snot nose kid once I step out from behind the curtain.

"Then don't," is all I can say. It doesn't take a rocket scientist. "Just..don't do it." I gently cup a lightning bug and send him off to fly in another direction. A safer place.

"God Soda do you have any idea how complicated this is? You act like everything's so damn simple, Jesus Christ." He's starting to rev up again. I throw him a cigarette and my lighter like a peace offering but I'm starting to tense up too. He pulls so hard off his first drag he looks like he wants his lungs to explode, and his next words fall out of his mouth before he lets the thick smoke escape in their wake. "You can't just not come home and expect me to be cool with that. When it's all said and done, I'm still in charge of you."

I hop off my perch and throw up my hands. "That's just it Darry. I'm tryin' to give you an out here. You don't gotta be in charge all the time over everything and everybody. Christ Almighty you can stand to lighten up. You make everything a fuckin' fight. Don't you just wanna get away sometimes? Go out into the night and escape? Be who we used to. Sneakin' in past curfew. Actin' our age. Guess what? You still can." My voice is rising and there's nothing I can do to control it; even Darry's glare can't stop me. "We're a team Darry. I've got your back. Let me go and I'll let you go. We can let ourselves off the hook once in a blue moon. Come down off the cross. Cause right now, all this," and my hands are flying around maniacal, "all this shit...it's eatin' us alive."

I don't say that it's Ponyboy eating us alive. I wouldn't dare.

Darry slowly stands up, and I can't tell if he's gonna surrender or take me on. He finally reaches full height and stares at me, his cigarette dangling like Dad's always did. Now I can tell he's definitely far from finished. I know not to be fooled by the smile he's giving; it's the patronizing kind. "You don't have any kind of clue do you?" And he waits for me to answer that. I just swallow. "Well little brother," and his sneer is close to hateful, "you don't know shit."

He's on his way to get me and I don't move. I simply wait for him.

"You think we're a team? Mmm maybe, somewhat," and he roughly grabs my shirt into his fist, "but don't you ever forget who you answer to. You wanna see the papers that prove it?"

The thought of mine and Pony's lives simplified to a few lines and a couple of signatures on paper makes me feel sick. How easy it would be for our case manager to have his bimbo secretary type up a different fate. "I been nice with you, but maybe too nice. I'm tryin' to give you some space and some freedom, cause the last thing I want is to keep tabs on another dorky kid brother. But I will if I have to. Believe me you and I both don't want that. You think you got no rules like some other hoods runnin' round here? Did you have a stroke and suddenly forget your last name? This is about respectin' the rules we have in this house so nobody has to sit and worry over whether or not your dumbass is dead in a gutter somewhere. I'd think after what we've been through you'd understand that real good."

He lets me go and I wilt a little, not realizing part of me was depending on his tight grip to hold me up. He doesn't notice my wobble cause he's staring at the burning cigarette he's used up and dropped. I crush it under my shoe since his feet are bare, then look back up at him, wondering if he's done bitching. He's not.

"And no Soda, I can't just let go and forget about it all every once in a while like you can. Wanna know why? Cause all this shit?" and his hands are wildly waving like mine before, mocking, "it's all on me." His next three words are powerhouses, deliberately measured and his face gets closer with each one. " I'm. In. Charge."

He briefly turns to look at Pony's window behind him, tonight not cracked open which is unusual for him, and remembers to keep it down, shaking his head as he faces me again. "And poor Dad ain't around here no more to worry 'bout you and all your wild antics and all your dickin' around. Unfortunately that falls on me now."

And the fact he brought up Dad worrying about me is crossing some line I didn't know I'd drawn. But I'm finding out it's pulsating with threat and so deeply carved.

In my eyes he's thrown the first punch and a violent flame gets triggered, shooting up my middle and racing around my veins. I give him a shove that hardly moves him, and he's so quick I hardly see his hard slap coming around and knocking the side of my head. I see only red as I run into the wall that is Darry with all the force I have, throw my arms around him and lean my head in low to ram his core while I work him backwards until I can shove him hard against the house. We just miss the porch light that's flickering with the dancing moths yet to be lured by the blue zap glow in the corner.

I knew I couldn't keep him contained for long; at least I got in one good shove, but he's already overtaken me and brings me and the potted fern crashing to the ground. Our slurs are tucked inside our grunts as we struggle on cold concrete. And maybe this is what we need. A good old fashioned slugfest. I take a few sharp jabs to my ribs and he takes a couple shots to his stomach he mistakenly left exposed.

"Motherfucker," Darry cries out in an agonizing pitch and I let him go immediately after accidentally poking him in the eye. He's bent over with a reflexive hand protecting the blue orb far too late, cursing up a storm.

"Shit man, I'm sorry Darry," I say and I mean it. "It was an accident." And it was. I'm quick to try and help him. "Let me see it," but he won't allow me to move his hand out of the way. My temper's been completely extinguished as I watch my brother wincing, temporarily blinded. What was once hot inside me has cooled into a nauseating mixture of regret and serves-you-right. "I'm sorry," I tell him again tenderly, but hoping he knows my apology is meant for his eye only and not the rest of it. He can't use Dad like that on me and I won't let him. Ever.

"S'okay," he says and brings his hand down, trying to open the injured eye, and finally through all the rubbing and watering and blinking he's able. He scans the moonlit yard before us, squinting. "Good news is I can still see out of it. Bad news is I still have extremely piss poor vision in both of 'em," he says in all his flatness, his way of lightening the mood.

He stays seated and I lie down on my back beside him, hardly able to stretch all the way out since most of the space out here is overtaken by this rickety furniture we've dragged from someone's junk left on the curb for Tuesday trash pickup. A wave of exhaustion is sweeping through now that most of the tension has passed.

"I'm sorry I brought up your fights with Dad," he says, and I feel his heartfelt apology as well as I can hear it. "I never shoulda said that."

I appreciate his remorse but mine and dad's last fight is already winding up again for the endless loop that constantly plays out in my brain. The unfortunate timing of it, hours before the car crash has solidified it to my history as our last and final conversation. Heated and angry is how we left each other, my disrespectful mouth forcing his look of sad disappointment in me. My punishments of a stinging belt and to clear our icy sidewalk had me cursing him on every stroke of the shovel that evening. I lightly close my eyes and wait for my heart to contract when I torture myself with the reminder that I was probably calling my own father a no good redneck piece of shit at the exact moment his life was taken from this Earth.

Darry's always right and I flick my lighter and work at climbing back into my self before we go inside. To become the brother I'm supposed to play. To find my smile and take my place on this carved out pedastal Ponyboy forces me to stand on, demanding I never get off and for whatever reason I let him control that about me. No matter I was never ever meant to be someone's lifeline.

My stress has me counting the slats of the porch railing and I won't allow myself to roll over and hold onto Darry when every fiber is crying for his comfort, and the dog down the street shouts his chained up frustration to anyone who'll listen.

I'm listening.

 **A/N:** Outsiders, SE Hinton

 _Thanks for reading!_


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